MP3/USB/Aux Hack Hidden Behind Cassette Facade

mp3-hiding-in-plain-sight

[Ivan] made something special with this car stereo hack. He altered the head unit to play MP3 files from USB and added an auxiliary line-in. But looking at it you’d never know. That’s thanks to the work he did to create a false button hiding the audio jack, and a false cassette hiding the USB port and MP3 player display. Possibly the best part is that the radio itself still works like it always did.

There are several components that went into making the system work. It starts with the cassette/radio head unit. To that he added an MP3 player with remote which he picked up on Deal Extreme. He wasn’t a huge fan of the IR remote that came with it so he rolled in a remote that mounts on the steering wheel. To pull everything together he used a PIC 16F877a. The microcontroller controls the lines which tell the head unit if a tape has been inserted. When [Ivan] selects either the Aux input or wants to play MP3s from a thumb drive the uC forces the head unit into cassette mode and the audio from the player is injected into the cassette player connections.

To help deter theft [Ivan] created two false fronts. The end of a cassette tape plugs into the USB port. The rewind button plugs into the Aux jack. You can get a good look at both in the demo after the break.

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Resurrecting ISA Hardware

[Alex] had an old FM radio tuner card come his way. It used an ISA connector, a standard that went the way of the dodo in the mid-nineties. With the challenge of implementing an ISA-bus to configure the card he set out on his mission. What he came up with is a working radio using the ISA card and driven by a PIC 16F877. Join us after the break for schematic, code, and a few details. Continue reading “Resurrecting ISA Hardware”

Vehicle Information Display Hacks

We’ve had a few folks send us info about their vehicle display hacks after seeing [Will O’Brien’s] motorcycle computer a few days ago.

On the left we have a display for an electric vehicle. [S1axter] is using a 4.3″ TFT screen to display charge information for each battery cell in the car. An ATmega88 collects the data and sends it to a breakout board with an LCD controller on it.

To the right is a display from a Formula Student project. a Matrix Orbital GLK19264-7T-1U LCD display provides a lot of real estate for displaying data. Right now [Alan] is still in the early prototyping stages, but the video after the break demonstrates the RPM readout using a function generator. It’s not shown in the video, but he tells us that he’s since tried it out with the engine and has a PIC 16f877 reading temperate data from the electronic control transmission sensors in addition to the RPM data.

Correction: Thanks to [j] for correcting our mistake. This is a Formula Student car.

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